Ten years ago. The heat between them. The fact they’d just been shot at a little while ago.
Aw, f**k it. He never was much good at thinking things through. He braced his hands on either side of her head and moved in closer, crowding her.
“Your arm,” she said, looking at the bandage, then back at him.
“Is fine.”
Her lips were still parted and he heard her breathing.
Rapid little pants in and out, like she was having trouble catching her breath. But this time she wasn’t pushing at him to let her go.
“Mac,” she whispered, whether in warning or invitation he didn’t know.
Before it became a denial spilling from her lips, he slanted his mouth over hers and took possession.
Chapter Two
Mac drank in the sound of Lily’s whimper, adding a groan of his own.
A thousand reasons why he shouldn’t be doing this fired through his brain. He shut them out. Fuck them all. He was doing this. She wasn’t a young girl anymore. She was an adult. And until and unless she said no, he was barreling full steam ahead.
Christ, she tasted good. Hot and sweet and wet. He shifted, wrapping his uninjured arm around her back to pull her against his body. He rimmed her lips with his tongue, then slid it between her teeth to find hers, lapping against the velvet softness. And she wasn’t saying no. Not with the way her body sank into his.
Lily palmed his chest, smoothing her warm hands over his skin. He couldn’t think rationally, just wanted her na**d against him. He skimmed her belly, feeling the muscles there quiver while he lifted her shirt and jerked it over her head. A sexy little black bra barely contained her breasts. He traced the swells where they dipped into the satin enclosure. She shuddered.
Her eyes—soft, wide pools of dark blue—registered surprise. He’d always loved her eyes. They told him so much about what she was thinking.
Don’t say a word, he pleaded mentally. He didn’t want anything to stop this.
She didn’t speak, instead grabbed his belt buckle and unhooked it, then released the snap from his jeans. His breath came out in short rasps as she drew the zipper down and slid her hand inside, wrapping her cool fingers around his heated cock.
He pulsed against her hand, surging forward, loving the feel of her skin against his. But he wanted more. So much more. He buried his face in her neck, inhaling the scent of her, drawing his tongue along the column of her throat.
He remembered the taste of her, like an intoxicant entering his blood stream, drugging him into a wild frenzy of untapped lust. He skimmed her flesh, sliding his fingers into her jeans.
The scent of her filled the air around them, a heady, potent aphrodisiac. He already knew how she’d taste and he wanted that sweet honey on his tongue.
Christ, he wanted it all and right now. It had been too damn long.
“Wait. Stop. Mac, stop.”
His motor was running, his engine revving in high gear, and she wanted to slam on the brakes?
Shit. He slowed down, withdrew his hand from her pants and pulled back, studying at her eyes. Eyes that spoke volumes, that read no. No, no, and no.
“What’s wrong?”
“We can’t do this. I can’t do this.” She released her sweet, tight grip on his c**k and started fixing her disheveled clothes.
Ah, hell. She was probably right, though his throbbing dick wanted to argue the point in a big way. He shoved it in his jeans and zipped up, staying silent while he gathered his composure, trying to figure out why the wildcat in his arms had suddenly tucked its tail and run.
Where had his common sense gone? One look, one whiff of her scent and he was off and running at high speed. He was on a case, not on vacation. This wasn’t the time to pursue Lily, to take up where they’d left off ten years ago. He had a ton of questions. Like who she was now and why she’d been at the museum.
“Okay, we won’t do this. If you’d rather talk than fuck, I have questions,” he said. “Why were you at the museum tonight?”
She whirled on him, the heat, the passion of a few moments ago gone from her eyes, replaced by a cold hardness.
“No. I have questions for you. And I’m not saying a damn thing until I get answers to my questions first.”
So much for warmth and sex. He felt every bit of the chill in the night air. Or maybe that was coming from Lily, who’d definitely turned on the cold, hard freeze. “Then I guess we’re not going to have much to say to each other, because I can’t tell you anything.”
She crossed her arms. “Ditto.”
Shit. He couldn’t exactly hold Lily captive without explaining why, but he sure as hell couldn’t reveal who he worked for and why he’d stolen the vial. Which meant she was going to believe he was still a thief. He hated that, but it was how it had to be.
Wild Riders was a secret. No one outside their organization knew they even existed. Hell, their own government didn’t even know. And it had to stay that way, which meant he’d have to lie to Lily.
Again. Just like ten years ago, when he told her didn’t care about her, didn’t love her, didn’t want her in his life.
And just like ten years ago, she was going to hate him.
Lily waited for Mac to say something, anything. Tell her he had a reasonable, logical explanation for breaking into the museum and stealing the artifact. Or, rather, the virus. This was so confusing.
“Well?”
He stared at her for a few seconds, then shook his head and left her standing in the bathroom.
Oh no. He was not going to get away with blowing her off again. She stalked out after him.
“You know, stealing someone’s wallet or a few bucks here and there was bad enough when you were younger,” she said, stepping around to the other side of the bike. He grabbed a clean shirt out of the saddlebag and put his jacket back on, then started lifting other things out. “I had hoped you had grown out of that petty thievery. What are you into now, Mac?
Luxury cars? Fine art? Knocking off a bank here and there?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he tossed a lump of something on the ground, then gathered pieces of wood and started a fire in the campsite’s pit. After that, he grabbed a roll and unraveled it.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up at her from his position on the ground.
“You were always a smart girl, Lily. What does it look like I’m doing?”
She scanned the area, finally making the connection.
Campsite. Tent. Oh hell no. “I am not staying here with you tonight.”
“Yeah, you are, since I’m not taking you anywhere else.
You didn’t give me much choice after showing up…”
She waited for him to finish the sentence. Of course, he didn’t. “And screwing up your theft of the artifact? Or the virus? Tell me about the vial. How did you know it was inside the artifact? What do you plan to do with it? How much are you making on this deal? Do you have any idea what terrorist organizations will do with something like that?”
He left the tent pieces and stood, approaching her. Just having him stand near her was unnerving. A few minutes ago she’d held his c**k in her hand—hot and hard, his mouth and hands on her, reminding her of the all the reasons she’d fallen in love with him before. Sexy, uninhibited and thrilling, he’d promised adventure and a trip to the dark side, a place she’d never been. But this wasn’t ten years ago. Now was reality, not a teenager’s fantasy.
If she hadn’t gathered her wits about her and stopped him, she could have easily fallen into the same trap again and had sex with him. Maybe she hadn’t learned a thing in ten years.
His eyes were warm, but his voice was cold. “I did steal the virus. But I can’t tell you why or what I’m going to do with it, other than I’m not selling it and it’s not going to fall into the hands of terrorists.”
She was so confused. What she really needed was to talk to her boss and her client. Did the museum even know what was inside that artifact? Oh, why didn’t she just call the police when she saw Mac pull up at the museum? She was in deep shit now.
She knew Mac’s history, and if she had a choice, she’d choose her agency to turn the vial over to, not Mac. Not a once petty, now probably professional thief.
“A virus like that could be worth a fortune.” She shuddered to think what someone could do with it. Countries looking to create chemical warfare. Terrorist organizations.
The possibilities were endless.
“I can’t tell you what I’m going to do with the virus.
But trust me, it’s nothing bad,” he said.
“And I’m supposed to believe you.”
He shrugged. “You have no reason to, but yeah, I’d like you to.”
The look hadn’t changed at all—street toughness mixed with charm. God, it was so sexy, had always served to dissolve her hesitations. It had worked so well back then. It didn’t now, and that actually hurt. He had stolen something dangerous and destructive. Despite their connections to each other and to the past, she couldn’t allow it. She grabbed her bag from the ground and pulled out her cell phone. Thank God she’d looped the long strap of her purse around her neck and shoulder or she’d have lost her purse in the scuffle in addition to her gun.
“I’m sorry, Mac, but I have to call this in. There’s no way I can allow this virus to get out, no matter what you’d like me to believe.”
She started punching numbers to call the agency, but Mac moved like a stroke of lightning. He was on her in seconds, jerked the phone out of her hand, threw it on the ground and stomped it to pieces. She stared dumbstruck at the crumbled remains of her phone, not sure if she wanted to cry or kill him. Judging by the trembling anger bubbling up inside her, probably both. She forced a calm she didn’t feel, refusing to break down in front of him.
“I’m sorry too, babe, but I can’t let you make that call.
If you were calling your boss or the cops, that would spell bad news for me.”
Gathering her wits about her, she said, “You should have thought about that before you broke into the museum.”
“Tell me who your client is.”
“I was hired by the museum to check night security.
Which obviously sucked since you managed to get in.”
Unbelievably, he grinned. She shook her head. He was proud of his prowess as a thief. Frustration ate at her, making her pace back and forth in hopes of releasing some of the furious tension boiling inside. Long term passion and feelings for Mac or not, she was a law abiding citizen, a former cop.
She followed the rules. And Mac had never followed them.
She’d found that exciting about him once, to her detriment. She wasn’t about to make the same mistake again.
“I’m not doing anything wrong, Lily.”
“Give me a reason to believe you.” This was why she had paused when she saw him at the museum, why she had delayed making that call. Instinct, maybe, but she’d somehow known it was him, couldn’t bear turning him over to the police.
Now she was kicking herself and needed some kind of proof, needed him to tell her anything at all that would make her believe in him.
“I don’t have one. But you know me.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I do. I know you’re a thief.”
“Okay, you’re right. But do you really think I’m the kind of person who’d sell a killer virus to terrorists?”
She didn’t think so. But ten years could change a person. Had Mac changed that much? “I don’t know.”
He reached out and skimmed his knuckles across her cheek. So gentle, the action so incongruent with his bad boy image. That’s what always made her insane about him. He was unpredictable, never fit into any kind of a mold, part of what was attractive about him. And she’d always been able to see beyond the surface, past what everyone else had seen of Mac Canfield. She’d seen the goodness in him. Was that part of him still there?
He hadn’t hurt her, and he could have. If he’d changed enough, become bad enough, he could have shot her, or left her behind to fend off the shooter. Instead, he’d grabbed her and taken her with him. He’d thrown his body over hers, making himself vulnerable to protect her.
“Don’t believe everything you see, Lily. Things aren’t always as they seem on the surface.”
She sighed. “Then if there’s a reasonable explanation for what you’re doing, tell me.” She wanted to believe him, wanted to accept that he’d changed, that what he was doing was some kind of superhero act, that he was working for the good guys.
“Sometimes you have to rely on faith and your instincts. What do your instincts tell you?”
“They didn’t serve me so well ten years ago,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For a lot of things. For ten years ago, for this. I can’t change the past and I can’t change you being in the wrong place at the wrong time tonight. What happened tonight was a fuckup and you got caught in the middle. Now you’re going to have to come with me. I know you don’t like it—I don’t like it. But I don’t have any other choice.”
She paused, her mind replaying what he’d just said.
“You can’t mean to kidnap me.”
He moved back to the tent and resumed erecting it.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you. I hadn’t expected to run into anyone and especially not you, but I sure as hell can’t let you go.”
Her frustration returned. She couldn’t believe she’d almost had sex with him. What the hell had she been thinking?
Oh, right. She hadn’t been. Just like when she’d offered her body like a sacrificial lamb, as if giving up her virginity to Mac would somehow open his eyes and make him realize she could be the greatest thing in his life.
Aw, f**k it. He never was much good at thinking things through. He braced his hands on either side of her head and moved in closer, crowding her.
“Your arm,” she said, looking at the bandage, then back at him.
“Is fine.”
Her lips were still parted and he heard her breathing.
Rapid little pants in and out, like she was having trouble catching her breath. But this time she wasn’t pushing at him to let her go.
“Mac,” she whispered, whether in warning or invitation he didn’t know.
Before it became a denial spilling from her lips, he slanted his mouth over hers and took possession.
Chapter Two
Mac drank in the sound of Lily’s whimper, adding a groan of his own.
A thousand reasons why he shouldn’t be doing this fired through his brain. He shut them out. Fuck them all. He was doing this. She wasn’t a young girl anymore. She was an adult. And until and unless she said no, he was barreling full steam ahead.
Christ, she tasted good. Hot and sweet and wet. He shifted, wrapping his uninjured arm around her back to pull her against his body. He rimmed her lips with his tongue, then slid it between her teeth to find hers, lapping against the velvet softness. And she wasn’t saying no. Not with the way her body sank into his.
Lily palmed his chest, smoothing her warm hands over his skin. He couldn’t think rationally, just wanted her na**d against him. He skimmed her belly, feeling the muscles there quiver while he lifted her shirt and jerked it over her head. A sexy little black bra barely contained her breasts. He traced the swells where they dipped into the satin enclosure. She shuddered.
Her eyes—soft, wide pools of dark blue—registered surprise. He’d always loved her eyes. They told him so much about what she was thinking.
Don’t say a word, he pleaded mentally. He didn’t want anything to stop this.
She didn’t speak, instead grabbed his belt buckle and unhooked it, then released the snap from his jeans. His breath came out in short rasps as she drew the zipper down and slid her hand inside, wrapping her cool fingers around his heated cock.
He pulsed against her hand, surging forward, loving the feel of her skin against his. But he wanted more. So much more. He buried his face in her neck, inhaling the scent of her, drawing his tongue along the column of her throat.
He remembered the taste of her, like an intoxicant entering his blood stream, drugging him into a wild frenzy of untapped lust. He skimmed her flesh, sliding his fingers into her jeans.
The scent of her filled the air around them, a heady, potent aphrodisiac. He already knew how she’d taste and he wanted that sweet honey on his tongue.
Christ, he wanted it all and right now. It had been too damn long.
“Wait. Stop. Mac, stop.”
His motor was running, his engine revving in high gear, and she wanted to slam on the brakes?
Shit. He slowed down, withdrew his hand from her pants and pulled back, studying at her eyes. Eyes that spoke volumes, that read no. No, no, and no.
“What’s wrong?”
“We can’t do this. I can’t do this.” She released her sweet, tight grip on his c**k and started fixing her disheveled clothes.
Ah, hell. She was probably right, though his throbbing dick wanted to argue the point in a big way. He shoved it in his jeans and zipped up, staying silent while he gathered his composure, trying to figure out why the wildcat in his arms had suddenly tucked its tail and run.
Where had his common sense gone? One look, one whiff of her scent and he was off and running at high speed. He was on a case, not on vacation. This wasn’t the time to pursue Lily, to take up where they’d left off ten years ago. He had a ton of questions. Like who she was now and why she’d been at the museum.
“Okay, we won’t do this. If you’d rather talk than fuck, I have questions,” he said. “Why were you at the museum tonight?”
She whirled on him, the heat, the passion of a few moments ago gone from her eyes, replaced by a cold hardness.
“No. I have questions for you. And I’m not saying a damn thing until I get answers to my questions first.”
So much for warmth and sex. He felt every bit of the chill in the night air. Or maybe that was coming from Lily, who’d definitely turned on the cold, hard freeze. “Then I guess we’re not going to have much to say to each other, because I can’t tell you anything.”
She crossed her arms. “Ditto.”
Shit. He couldn’t exactly hold Lily captive without explaining why, but he sure as hell couldn’t reveal who he worked for and why he’d stolen the vial. Which meant she was going to believe he was still a thief. He hated that, but it was how it had to be.
Wild Riders was a secret. No one outside their organization knew they even existed. Hell, their own government didn’t even know. And it had to stay that way, which meant he’d have to lie to Lily.
Again. Just like ten years ago, when he told her didn’t care about her, didn’t love her, didn’t want her in his life.
And just like ten years ago, she was going to hate him.
Lily waited for Mac to say something, anything. Tell her he had a reasonable, logical explanation for breaking into the museum and stealing the artifact. Or, rather, the virus. This was so confusing.
“Well?”
He stared at her for a few seconds, then shook his head and left her standing in the bathroom.
Oh no. He was not going to get away with blowing her off again. She stalked out after him.
“You know, stealing someone’s wallet or a few bucks here and there was bad enough when you were younger,” she said, stepping around to the other side of the bike. He grabbed a clean shirt out of the saddlebag and put his jacket back on, then started lifting other things out. “I had hoped you had grown out of that petty thievery. What are you into now, Mac?
Luxury cars? Fine art? Knocking off a bank here and there?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he tossed a lump of something on the ground, then gathered pieces of wood and started a fire in the campsite’s pit. After that, he grabbed a roll and unraveled it.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up at her from his position on the ground.
“You were always a smart girl, Lily. What does it look like I’m doing?”
She scanned the area, finally making the connection.
Campsite. Tent. Oh hell no. “I am not staying here with you tonight.”
“Yeah, you are, since I’m not taking you anywhere else.
You didn’t give me much choice after showing up…”
She waited for him to finish the sentence. Of course, he didn’t. “And screwing up your theft of the artifact? Or the virus? Tell me about the vial. How did you know it was inside the artifact? What do you plan to do with it? How much are you making on this deal? Do you have any idea what terrorist organizations will do with something like that?”
He left the tent pieces and stood, approaching her. Just having him stand near her was unnerving. A few minutes ago she’d held his c**k in her hand—hot and hard, his mouth and hands on her, reminding her of the all the reasons she’d fallen in love with him before. Sexy, uninhibited and thrilling, he’d promised adventure and a trip to the dark side, a place she’d never been. But this wasn’t ten years ago. Now was reality, not a teenager’s fantasy.
If she hadn’t gathered her wits about her and stopped him, she could have easily fallen into the same trap again and had sex with him. Maybe she hadn’t learned a thing in ten years.
His eyes were warm, but his voice was cold. “I did steal the virus. But I can’t tell you why or what I’m going to do with it, other than I’m not selling it and it’s not going to fall into the hands of terrorists.”
She was so confused. What she really needed was to talk to her boss and her client. Did the museum even know what was inside that artifact? Oh, why didn’t she just call the police when she saw Mac pull up at the museum? She was in deep shit now.
She knew Mac’s history, and if she had a choice, she’d choose her agency to turn the vial over to, not Mac. Not a once petty, now probably professional thief.
“A virus like that could be worth a fortune.” She shuddered to think what someone could do with it. Countries looking to create chemical warfare. Terrorist organizations.
The possibilities were endless.
“I can’t tell you what I’m going to do with the virus.
But trust me, it’s nothing bad,” he said.
“And I’m supposed to believe you.”
He shrugged. “You have no reason to, but yeah, I’d like you to.”
The look hadn’t changed at all—street toughness mixed with charm. God, it was so sexy, had always served to dissolve her hesitations. It had worked so well back then. It didn’t now, and that actually hurt. He had stolen something dangerous and destructive. Despite their connections to each other and to the past, she couldn’t allow it. She grabbed her bag from the ground and pulled out her cell phone. Thank God she’d looped the long strap of her purse around her neck and shoulder or she’d have lost her purse in the scuffle in addition to her gun.
“I’m sorry, Mac, but I have to call this in. There’s no way I can allow this virus to get out, no matter what you’d like me to believe.”
She started punching numbers to call the agency, but Mac moved like a stroke of lightning. He was on her in seconds, jerked the phone out of her hand, threw it on the ground and stomped it to pieces. She stared dumbstruck at the crumbled remains of her phone, not sure if she wanted to cry or kill him. Judging by the trembling anger bubbling up inside her, probably both. She forced a calm she didn’t feel, refusing to break down in front of him.
“I’m sorry too, babe, but I can’t let you make that call.
If you were calling your boss or the cops, that would spell bad news for me.”
Gathering her wits about her, she said, “You should have thought about that before you broke into the museum.”
“Tell me who your client is.”
“I was hired by the museum to check night security.
Which obviously sucked since you managed to get in.”
Unbelievably, he grinned. She shook her head. He was proud of his prowess as a thief. Frustration ate at her, making her pace back and forth in hopes of releasing some of the furious tension boiling inside. Long term passion and feelings for Mac or not, she was a law abiding citizen, a former cop.
She followed the rules. And Mac had never followed them.
She’d found that exciting about him once, to her detriment. She wasn’t about to make the same mistake again.
“I’m not doing anything wrong, Lily.”
“Give me a reason to believe you.” This was why she had paused when she saw him at the museum, why she had delayed making that call. Instinct, maybe, but she’d somehow known it was him, couldn’t bear turning him over to the police.
Now she was kicking herself and needed some kind of proof, needed him to tell her anything at all that would make her believe in him.
“I don’t have one. But you know me.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I do. I know you’re a thief.”
“Okay, you’re right. But do you really think I’m the kind of person who’d sell a killer virus to terrorists?”
She didn’t think so. But ten years could change a person. Had Mac changed that much? “I don’t know.”
He reached out and skimmed his knuckles across her cheek. So gentle, the action so incongruent with his bad boy image. That’s what always made her insane about him. He was unpredictable, never fit into any kind of a mold, part of what was attractive about him. And she’d always been able to see beyond the surface, past what everyone else had seen of Mac Canfield. She’d seen the goodness in him. Was that part of him still there?
He hadn’t hurt her, and he could have. If he’d changed enough, become bad enough, he could have shot her, or left her behind to fend off the shooter. Instead, he’d grabbed her and taken her with him. He’d thrown his body over hers, making himself vulnerable to protect her.
“Don’t believe everything you see, Lily. Things aren’t always as they seem on the surface.”
She sighed. “Then if there’s a reasonable explanation for what you’re doing, tell me.” She wanted to believe him, wanted to accept that he’d changed, that what he was doing was some kind of superhero act, that he was working for the good guys.
“Sometimes you have to rely on faith and your instincts. What do your instincts tell you?”
“They didn’t serve me so well ten years ago,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For a lot of things. For ten years ago, for this. I can’t change the past and I can’t change you being in the wrong place at the wrong time tonight. What happened tonight was a fuckup and you got caught in the middle. Now you’re going to have to come with me. I know you don’t like it—I don’t like it. But I don’t have any other choice.”
She paused, her mind replaying what he’d just said.
“You can’t mean to kidnap me.”
He moved back to the tent and resumed erecting it.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you. I hadn’t expected to run into anyone and especially not you, but I sure as hell can’t let you go.”
Her frustration returned. She couldn’t believe she’d almost had sex with him. What the hell had she been thinking?
Oh, right. She hadn’t been. Just like when she’d offered her body like a sacrificial lamb, as if giving up her virginity to Mac would somehow open his eyes and make him realize she could be the greatest thing in his life.
